


Rubicon

by hellabaloo



Category: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 03:03:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12072294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellabaloo/pseuds/hellabaloo
Summary: It was amazingly easy, Jason thought as he watched the pictures burn, to erase any evidence of their two years together.





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_spruce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_spruce/gifts).



> A very, very belated happy Yuletide 2014! There was a Bourne movie marathon on tv several weeks ago and it gave me the kick in the pants I needed to finally get this written. I hope you like it :)
> 
> **Additional Content Notes:** Semi-graphic description of bullet wounds

 

.

 

_“It’s never going to be over, like this._ I _don’t want you to—”_

_“We don’t have a choice.”_

_“Yes, you do.”_

 

.

 

The small fire crackled and hissed as it melted the plastic covering of Marie’s passports and burned the photo-strips for ID’s they’d taken whenever she had changed her hair. There was a sharp, chemical smell to the smoke that Jason had never smelled before. It was something he knew he would have remembered; not actively, of course, but it’d just be there, in his head like any of the things he just happened to know.

It was amazingly easy, Jason thought distractedly as he watched the pictures burn, to erase any physical evidence of their two years together. Those might be the only pictures of Marie Kreutz left. She probably didn’t feature too prominently in her brother’s family photo album. Maybe her grandmother had kept pictures of her as a kid around. In any case, it didn’t matter now. He had barely tossed the pictures into the fire before they were engulfed, blackening and curling around the edges. He watched as Marie’s smiling face warped and twisted, the photos turning to ash. He didn't need to do it—Marie was dead and they would never be able to use her against him—but the mechanical process of burning the evidence of their life together was comforting somehow. It was their's and no one else's, now and always.

_“Look at this. Look at what they make you give.”_

He hadn’t understood then what the Treadstone asset had meant. At the time, he didn’t really have anything to worry about losing. 

When they were in the car, sinking deeper into the river, Jason had avoided looking at the exit wound on Marie's head. He knew, he had _known_ what it meant from the moment the bullet struck; his brain had supplied information about survival rates from brain trauma and the rate of blood loss from a gunshot wound to the head automatically. It didn’t stop him from trying to do something to save her. But he needed to let Marie go, let her drift away into the murky darkness of the river until he couldn’t see any part of her anymore. Jason’s lungs were burning when he broke the surface and gasped in a huge breath. He ducked back under the water immediately in case his pursuer was still watching, waiting to confirm his target had been eliminated. But there wasn’t another shot, and Jason was thankful for the gunman's arrogance. 

Jason stopped swimming half a klick upstream, and crawled ashore. He stayed there a while, trying to catch his breath and push away the growing feeling that his chest was being compressed by some invisible weight. The feeling didn’t go away, but he dragged himself up and started walking anyway.

They had never really blended in well India, but they stood out less among the tourists that flocked to the beaches in Goa than other places. Marie had picked it. Jason would have chosen Mumbai or New Dehli, huge cities where they could easily have gotten lost in the crowds. But it wasn’t a bad alternative, and Marie had always loved the ocean. So, Jason had dredged up the little Portuguese he knew and Marie picked up some Hindi and Konkani somewhere along the way and they made themselves comfortable. 

Too comfortable. 

And it was his fault for not being more vigilant. Marie was dead because of him. He may not have fired the shot, but he might as well have loaded the gun. He had hoped it wouldn't end this way. They were off the grid, they were halfway around the world, they—their illusion of peace had been brutally shattered, and Jason felt adrift without Marie beside him. He rubbed at his chest absentmindedly, like he could physically smooth away the feeling that something was reaching into his chest and _squeezing_ the air out of him.

He tried to never look too conspicuous, even if he was always going to stand out more in India than other parts of the world. But now Jason was a white man off the beaten tourist path in Goa, wet and dirty, but with good shoes and a better watch walking by himself: he was bound to raise some suspicions before long. He needed to get to work.

So, he started a small fire and burned everything that he didn’t need from the cache of fake passports they had kept in a separate location in case their shack was compromised. Reaching into his back pocket there were two more passports and a photo. He went to throw it into the fire too, but found he couldn’t. It was of him and Marie together, smiling and not even looking at the camera, and it looked nothing like any other photograph he had left of her. It was from Greece, just before they left her café and moped rental store. The sun had caught in her recently-blonde hair and made it glow like spun gold, and it felt like maybe they could make the thing between them work. A customer had taken it and sent it to the store with a note. They were gone the next day.

For two years, it had worked. They left Greece and crisscrossed southern Europe before ending up in Istanbul. Jason had a sense about the cities they visited—Athens, Belgrade, Dubrovnik, Bratislava, among a handful of others—and found people to get them passports and what other forms of identification he thought might be useful. But after the first four months when he was still constantly looking over his shoulder, when he didn’t let them stay in the same hotel for more than a few nights, let alone the same city, they settled into a routine. It was nice, traveling with Marie. She had one of those faces that made people trust her; she made friends wherever they went, to Jason’s chagrin. And when they curled up together, wherever they were staying that night, the nightmares were just that little bit better. 

Jason stood up from the fire, tucked the picture back into his pocket, and made a decision. He had made Treadstone a promise in Paris that he intended to keep. 

Jason knew he wasn’t doing this for Marie; she wouldn’t have wanted this. Marie had tried to help him as best she could, she encouraged him to write everything down, never once doubting that eventually he’d unlock some other part of his brain. One that wasn’t tainted by knowledge he didn’t know how he’d attained and would have given nearly anything to get rid of. He wanted to honor her request, her last request, that she had made of him and choose not to retaliate. But she didn’t know Treadstome—how they operated, how he’d always be perceived as a threat, whether he was one or not. Jason knew this the same way he knew how to speak and tie his shoes and make coffee. It was a bone-deep certainty, one that right now gave him an objective. He would do this on his terms, to claw back only a small part of the peace he’d found with Marie. She wouldn’t have approved, but she had known his nature and loved him anyway. 

He gathered everything he might need from their shack—passports, cash, his gun—and did one last sweep of what had been his and Marie’s bedroom, and closed the door.

 

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“Go ahead. Go on. Go on. Do it. _Do it_ ,” Abbott hisses.

Jason’s gun is digging into the back of Abbott’s head and he knows what will happen if he pulls the trigger. How blood and bits of brain and bone will coat the wall and seep into the carpet. But he’s worked out that Abbott’s barely more important than Conklin was in the scheme of things. Marie was right, it won’t end if he killed Abbott here, like this. He'd never get answers, _real_ answers to the jagged puzzle pieces that make up his fragmented memory. It’s the thing that stops him from pulling the trigger.

“She wouldn’t want me to,” Jason says. It feels right to tell this man the truth, even if he knows Abbott won’t believe him. “It’s the only reason you’re alive.”

He clicks the tape recorder off with a vicious pleasure and slams the gun down on the desk beside Abbott’s head. Jason leaves the room and Abbott with a choice to make.

 

.

 


End file.
